A perfect day

The coffee was weak, my toast was burnt, and my omelet tasted bland. My wife’s breakfast wasn’t much better—her crêpes looked soggy and lumpy. That’s not all. The restaurant was loud and had a strange echo and a cold breeze shook me every time a customer opened the door.

Despite the food and the surroundings, I wouldn’t have changed anything. The morning was as close to perfect as it gets.

My wife and I have been working out every day and watching our diets. We’ve been eating relatively healthy and have been good about not going out to eat. However, with the holidays over and the new year well underway, we jumped at the chance to sit down together for a quiet breakfast over a recent Saturday morning.

When we got to the diner, a waiter seated us right away. We picked out our meals off the menu and soon were on our way. We chatted about little things. I brought up our kids and the most recent communications we had from our two grown children. My wife brought up the schedule for the week ahead and how our youngest son needed a ride home from band practice. We went back and forth like that for most of the meal.

I brought up ideas about possible weekend getaway trips in March and April, but nothing really caught either of our attentions and we were off to other topics.

My wife is a teacher and she told me about a new kid she was getting in her classroom. She got that glimmer in her eye that she gets every time she gets a new student. For her, she views each new kid as a puzzle, a challenge to solve. You could tell her thoughts were racing a-mile-a-minute coming up with ideas to help the student with the transition.

I joked that I didn’t have anything for her birthday. She, of course, asked what the wrapped presents were that were sitting next to my side of the bed. “Umm, oh yeah, those,” I mumbled under my breath.

The coffee was weak, but fortunately the waiter kept filling up my cup, giving me a much needed jumpstart. The conversation returned to our kids, how we miss being a family of five, but how we also need to let them, at least the two grown ones, make their own choices and live their own lives.

When we had gotten our fill, we both looked at each other. We weren’t really ready for the conversation to end, but we were thankful to have the other to talk to and to face life’s challenges.

Yes, the breakfast was as uneventful and run-of-the-mill as they come, but it was great to hold at bay the outside world, if only for a short time.

In the end, it was the absolute perfect way to spend a morning.